Enthusiastic Readers

Reading is one of the most essential skills we learn. Learning to read at St Aidan’s is planned to promote a love of reading, story and language. It includes systematic teaching of phonics, set in the context of a rich literacy environment and including enjoying some of the best books and stories around. We have a whole school strategy to develop a range of reading skills and attitudes and to create opportunities to read across the curriculum using a whole class text, Power of Reading and guided reading to develop comprehension, understanding and decoding skills.

Classroom activities and interventions ensure that children move quickly and easily through all the sounds, before moving onto new reading skills. Here at St Aidan’s we use a whole school phonics programme based on letters and sounds to make sure that all our children make good progress. Phonics lessons are fun and have clear structure, pace and progression underpinned by regular assessment. Children’s early reading in Key Stage 1 is supported by using phonically decodable texts. High frequency words are taught as part of the phonics lesson.

Additional provision is made available for all children who do not make expected progress in phonics. Extra provision is made available to children in Yr2 and Yr3 who did not achieve the pass rate in the Yr1 phonics test.

Home reading is recognised as a vital part of the learning to read process. Every child has a reading record and take part in well planned and meaningful guided reading sessions.

The school has an outdoor learning library as well as a guided reading book library where children have access to a wide range of high quality texts, to read in school, at play and lunchtime and to share at home. These books are organised using the Book Banding colours so that the children read books that are appropriate for their reading level. For those children who are at the early stages of learning we have a collection of phonetically decodable books from the Oxford Reading Tree.